Our Tumblr project has explored over 400 US-UK cross-cultural topics. As the Guardian continues to reach a global audience, the nature of 'translations' is changing

Our reader-submitted English to English Valentine's explored love and romance from a cross-cultural perspective. Photograph: Guardian

Since its launch last May, the Guardian's English to English Tumblr project has explored hundreds of topics that cause great confusion (or, at the very least, a bit of head-scratching) to people reading from different locations around the globe.

The project was launched by journalists in our US office after we found ourselves constantly defending 'Americanisms' in story threads. We'd come to learn that an 'Americanism' was a vague descriptor that, yes, included how we phrased and spelled things, but also would come to gauge how we devoted coverage to celebrities, holidays, music and foods. This particular open thread about Thanksgiving, for example, will go down in infamy as the Americanism heard round the world, but exchanges like these were far more common:

Tumblr, a blogging platform famed for its ability to draw niche crowds, was a natural fit for English to English, which we billed as our attempt at bridging the cultural divide between readers in the UK and US. Martin Pengelly, Emma Keller and Adam Gabbatt are the office Brits willing to address everything from simple word definitions -- here's a video of Gabbatt explaining the Britishism "cheers" - to frustrations with Americans not being able to tell Cockney and Australian accents apart (a claim this writer disputes). For the Americans, Amanda Holpuch, Erin McCann and I attempted to explain America's oftentimes unhealthy obsessions with open offices, the Super Bowl and chicken-fried steak.

We assign a cultural advantage to each cultural 'translation' - Prince Harry's existence and popularity among Americans is clearly a UK advantage, for example - and competition at times gets a bit heated. UK readers handily won our Christmas foods popularity poll, spilling a lukewarm glass of mulled wine all over the hopes of eggnog-swilling Americans. The Americans have so far only managed to take home decisive victories in the fields of natural disasters and reality television, though we hope to rebound in 2014. Our Canadian and Australian readers also jump into the blog on occasion, hinting to us that US to UK may not be the only relationship we explore for much longer.

The most popular translations have always arrived directly from our readers, sent directly to our Tumblr inbox or tweeted using #Eng2Eng on Twitter. After a year of assisting our readers with such translations, we've learned two things. The first is that any serious cultural or linguistic differences we may have are best solved by poking a healthy bit of fun at each other. The second is that a lot can change in a year. The formerly endless comment streams debating whether or not two forms of spellings can appear on one website have certainly abated, which allows readers to get away from our differences to better discuss the story at hand.

As the Guardian's readership continues to grow and evolve, we look forward to watching the discussion about our two cultures grow from straight 'vest equals sweater' translations into a true exploration of what it means to maintain our so-called 'special relationship' in all things entertainment, news and pop culture.

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